Paralysis Problems
Written by admin on May 13, 2009
The final resort of Microsoft advocates is to claim helplessness. Helplessness is hardly a defensible state for those supposed to be plying their expertise, but let’s leave that aside. Some advocates claim that they are tied to Internet Explorer because existing built infrastructure, such as Websites and Intranets are designed for that browser alone.
This issue is not as large as it might seem. Firstly, all modern browsers, including Mozilla, have a legacy compatibility mode that is used to digest, and display in good order, older Web pages. So there is an immediate “soft upgrade” path available. Secondly, the occasional differences between IE and the standards that Mozilla follows are now well documented. Any Web developer can point to the basic issues at hand. Thirdly, an Intranet is much like an early database. It is inevitable that at some point informal data must be migrated to more standardised formats, so that its future availability is assured. The same is true of Web content: sooner or later it must be upgraded towards the Web standards that will ensure it is available on an ongoing basis. It has been the experience of several large content-oriented companies that the combination of HTML+CSS or XHTML+CSS is an entirely manageable way to renovate old websites.
* Web pages are data. Migrating that data towards standards is an inevitable process.
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